Whole Faith Living Earth

Does Your Gospel Have Mussels?

Nathan Aaberg — July 31, 2015 — Leave a comment

My youngest son and I recently canoed the Wisconsin River on a clear, sunny Sunday as a way to mark his 13^th birthday. From streets, buildings, cars, trains, screens, and a man-made world in constant motion, we found ourselves experiencing a radical change in experience and surroundings.

We were on a broad, slow-moving river lined with tall trees and graced with the occasional sand bar and wooded island. Turtles sunning themselves. Kingfishers swooping low over the water. A bald eagle wheeling in the sky far off in the distance. Crows calling. Two sandhill cranes honking at us in indignation as they slowly gained altitude to fly further downstream.

One of our favorite moments of the trip was when we stopped at one of the islands and wandered about the sandy upstream section. The hot sand burned our feet so we moved quickly to the small, shallow channel that lay between the island and the nearby bank. This channel’s flow was far more clear than the main channel of the river, and in it we found a number of mussels. Several, thick and gnarly and trailing vegetative matter, appeared very old.

We could actually see a smaller mussel moving along the sandy bed, sometimes even positioned length-wise on end like a quarter on its edge. We could see its underwater trail in the sand, a faint and sinuous line across the sandy channel bed’s curvy lines of low dunes.

“Moving” is actually far too fast a word. Even “inching” is too fast.

You had to look carefully as its progress was so slow. But there it was.

Moving.

It was slowly moving by extending its fleshy “foot” forward and then pulling itself forward.

The moving mussel.

My son, out of interest or politeness, listened as I told him about the mussel’s natural history. The male mussel releases its sperm into the water, and when a female mussel of the same species pulls in a quantity of stream water for filtering out of its food, the sperm have their opportunity to find the eggs within the female and fertilize them.

But we haven’t even gotten to the interesting part. The fertilized egg grows into a tiny larvae called a glochidia, which must attach itself to a fish if it is to continue its life cycle. So adult mussels often shape bunches of their glochidia into shapes that resemble the normal prey of the fish they need to attract. These shapes can be things like small fish swimming in a current, worms, and even crayfish.

When a fish investigates and then bites into the bunch (cue the Mission Impossible theme music), the individual glochidia have their chance to attach to the fish, usually on the gills. Eventually, the glochydia transitions into a juvenile mussel which drops off of the fish, descends to the stream bottom, and begins its independent life with little or no harm having been done to the fish. The beauty of this system is that the adult mussel’s progeny are able to hitch a ride to a distant location.

Just to reassure you, I should mention that I didn’t lecture him. And I didn’t share nearly the level of detail that you are reading here. I just shared the fundamentals of what I know of mussels and their lives and their value to the life of a river. Above all, I shared my own sense of wonder.

In retrospect, I wish I would have have talked with him in the same way about the Christian faith during the trip. Not in a lecture. Just the fundamentals as I know them in the language that is true to me. And with the mystery and heartfelt conviction of the faith’s underlying truth and values.

One of the fundamentals I would share is the reality that life, even a life of faith, will have struggles just like the westerly wind that made some of our paddling hard work.

Another fundamental would be this – humanity has indeed been given special capacities, and yet, simultaneously, we are in a sacred fellowship with the rest of creation. All of Creation matters to God. All of Creation should matter to us.

I would tell him, too, that beginning to gain an understanding of God and the life that God desires us to live is as complex an undertaking as understanding this world and its workings. But the effort to seek that understanding and to act on what we do know at each moment of our lives is what life is about and is worth the effort.

Ultimately, we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves. We should renew Gods’ world even as we use it for our survival.

The mussel has something to teach us about that ethic. Mussels feed by sucking in water and filtering out food items like like algae, bacteria, and detritus. The mussels then expel clear, clean water. When mussels occur in large beds, as they often did decades and centuries ago, the net effect was a purifying of the waters of the stream. Clear water allowed more light to reach algae and aquatic plants which supported more creatures that feed on the algae and plants. The result was a underwater world that was more full of more life

As I write this I am convicted. I must tell him all that. I will.

I hope and pray that he will eventually and of his own free seek out God and live out a God-fearing life all of his days. And as part of that life of faith, I hope and pray that his faith and life will possess a love for God’s world, in both its eye-catching and humble forms.

In other words, I hope and pray that the Gospel he follows will have mussels.

Does yours?

Bold Insights from a Different Francis

Nathan Aaberg — July 16, 2015 — Leave a comment

Before I began reading his book Pollution and the Death of Man, I had only heard of Francis A. Schaeffer in reference to the Christian pro-life movement. He is one of the founding fathers of the intense conviction that abortion is profoundly wrong and that Christians should do all they can to stop it.

In light of the fact that there are many fellow Christians who are zealously pro-life when it comes to abortion and yet are completely sanguine about the destruction of the rest of life on God’s earth, I couldn’t help assuming that Schaeffer had a similar theological incoherence. This impression was reinforced by the fact that I first heard of the book from listening to Christian radio talk show host Janet Parshall. She regularly refers to Pollution and the Death of Man when she talks in alarm about the growing concern people have for the environment. She reminds her audience that Schaeffer had warned that human dignity would be compromised if humanity was presumed to have anything in common with nature and if humanity’s freedom to use the world in any way was questioned.

Forty-five years since its publication this book’s arguments still resonate.

Nevertheless, out of curiousity, I ordered the book and read it. I was floored. It certainly conveys a fierce love of God and commitment to the ideas that come from the Bible. But it also fiercely asserts that those ideas uniquely give real value to nature and that Christians have for too long been AWOL in caring for nature the way they should. It contains powerful ideas about what the true relationship should be between humanity and the rest of nature. And these ideas challenge the way Christians have thought about nature and acted towards it for centuries.

Because the book’s essential ideas have been misrepresented and because those ideas are still relevant today, I am using this blog post to share 10 key points about the book. I am including Scheaffer’s own words as much as possible because of their passion and power.

I would also encourage you to learn more about Francis Schaeffer. He was a complex person who led a complex life and challenged, in some way or other, almost everyone. He was a relentless warrior on behalf of Biblical truth in the world of theology and philosophy. There are, in fact, elements of what he wrote and spoke that I profoundly disagree with. He was also a person who desired to bring people together and engage with them in conversation, fellowship, and mutual learning. He and his wife Edith founded the L’Abri community in Switzerland in 1955 which has become a network of learning centers around the world where people can ask honest questions about the Christian faith while enjoying fellowship and hospitality. He also believed that Christians should be compassionate and engaged with the culture around them even as they hold tightly to Biblical truths. Along those lines, he wrote this startling sentence: “Biblical orthodoxy without compassion is surely the ugliest thing in the world.”

You can learn more about him here. The best article I read was by Michael Hamilton in a 1997 issue of Christianity Today (you must, sadly, be a subscriber to read the whole thing). Here is an excellent quotation from that article about Scheaffer:

“Ideas were to him literally matters of life and death. History, thought Schaeffer, taught that the intellectual base on which a people build their society will determine that society’s laws and character: “There is a flow to history and culture. This flow is rooted and has its wellspring in the thoughts of people.” His singular message was that a society cannot hope for righteousness and justice without thinking the thoughts of God from the bottom up.”

This gives you a sense of his intensity and intellectual energy. It also helps you understand a bit why in his view the unmooring of Western civilization from Christian foundations and its movement towards cultural relativism alarmed him.

That same intensity and intellect is displayed in Pollution and the Death of Man. I don’t necessarily agree with every single point he makes. Yet, there is much treasure and truth here. It makes one wonder what would the world would be like if Christians and the Church had been living out the principles Schaeffer presents in this book over the last two millennia. Above all, this book shows that taking the Bible seriously and reading it carefully leads to a profound commitment to being a good shepherd of the earth who finds wonder and beauty in it.

1. Schaeffer wrote in the context of a growing consciousness that humanity is destroying the world that led some to blame Christianity: Published in 1970, Pollution and the Death of Man was Schaeffer’s effort to insert Christianity into the battle of ideas surrounding the realization that nature was being destroyed. In 1962 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published and caused America to rethink its relationship with chemicals. In 1966, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation released plans to build two dams in the Grand Canyon (can you imagine that?), but the Sierra Club and others vociferously fought those plans and were ultimately successful. In 1969 the Cuyahoga River caught fire for the thirteenth time in its history, a brutal symbol for all that was wrong with America’s use of technology and relationship with nature (check out this article about how local responses to the problem of industrial pollution, not necessarily the Clean Water Act, resulted in the 1969 fire being the last on the Cuyahoga).

Thinkers grappled with the ultimate causes of this environmental destruction. In 1967, Lynn White, Jr.’s article “The Historical Roots of Our Environmental Crisis” was published. In it, he centered the blame for Western civilization’s unrelenting exploitation of nature on Christianity. An expert in Medieval technology, White argued that the paradigm-shifting triumph of Christianity had squashed the notion that there was spirit and sacredness in nature. Instead, it established humanity’s proper role as harsh, exploitative dominators. Nature, in other words, existed solely for the use of humanity. This assumption, White insists, has always made Christianity the most anthropocentric religion in the world.

Another key thesis of White’s was that the tsunami of negative impacts brought by science and technology can’t be addressed by applying science and technology in new ways. Christianity is at the root of the marriage of science and technology and is at the root of the idea that a tree is just a tree and is there for our exploitation. If we don’t change how we think of nature morally and ethically, nothing else will change. And because Western civilization’s great moral ideas come from Christianity, Christianity must be part of any solution. White pointed to Saint Francis as offering a better Christian path of faith and life.

2. Neither polytheism nor modern science are the answers, and both threaten the true nature of humanity: In Pollution and the Death of Man, Schaeffer wholeheartedly agrees that there is an environmental crisis. He also agrees with White that the destruction of nature is, at heart, a religious and moral problem. But he asserts that neither pantheism nor a modern, science-based philosophy are good answers either.

A morality based on either results in only a pragmatic concern for nature. “The only reason we are called upon to treat nature well is because of its effects on man and our children and the generations to come. So in reality,….man is left with a completely egoistic position in regard to nature. No reason is given – moral or logical – for regarding nature as something in itself.”

Schaeffer asserts, too, that pantheism and modernism undercut man’s dignity and will indeed bring the death of man in a metaphorical sense because all is reduced to particles and particles have no meaning. When humanity is merely another part of nature, which both pantheism and modern science suggest, then people can be treated like any other element of nature.

3. The wrong kind of Christianity will lead to wrong views of nature: Listen to these words by Schaeffer:

“It is well to stress, then, that Christianity does not automatically have an answer; it has to be the right kind of Christianity. Any Christianity that rests upon a dichotomy – some sort of Platonic concept – does not have an answer to nature; and we must say with sorrow that much orthodoxy, much evangelical Christianity, is rooted in Platonic concept. In this kind of Christianity there is only interest in the “upper story,” in the heavenly things – only in “saving the soul” and getting it to Heaven.”

In one of the best stories of the book, Schaeffer relates how he walked over to a pagan community across a ravine from a Christian school he was visiting. He was told that he was the first person from the school to ever have visited them. What especially struck Schaeffer was that the Christian school was ugly while the pagan community’s landscape and buildings were beautiful. Schaeffer considers this situation and writes: “Here you have a Christianity that is failing to take into account man’s responsibility and proper relationship to nature.”

Later, Schaeffer writes: “God is interested in creation. He does not despise it. There is no reason whatsoever, and it is absolutely false Biblically, for the Christian to have a Platonic view of nature. What God has made, I, who am also a creature, must not despise.”

4. We should respect what God has created: For Schaeffer, understanding nature properly rests on the fundamental truth that God created the world and the cosmos. God is not part of nature. Nature is separate from God. This, Schaeffer asserts, is the basis for science.

But the distinctness of God from nature does not mean nature is of no value. Because God made nature, all of nature deserves our “high respect.” Listen to what Schaeffer writes:

“But while we should not romanticize the tree, we must realize God made it and it deserves respect because He made it as a tree. Christians who do not believe in the complete evolutionary scale have reason to respect nature as the total evolutionist never can, because we believe God made these things specifically in their own areas. So if we are going to argue against the evolutionists intellectually, we should show the results of our beliefs in our attitudes. The Christian is a man who has a reason for dealing with each created thing with a high level of respect.”

To consider the things of this world as worthless or low, Schaeffer asserts, is to insult God.

In addition, we have God’s own example to follow. Schaeffer writes, “… God treats His creation with integrity: each thing in its own order, each thing the way He made it. If God treats His creation in that way, should we not treat our fellow-creatures with similar integrity? If God treats the tree like a tree, the machine like a machine, the man like a man, shouldn’t I, as a fellow-creature, do the same – treating each thing in integrity in its own order? And for the highest reason: because I love God – I love the One who has made it! Loving the Lover who has made it, I have respect for the things He has made.”

5. Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension remind us that all things spiritual and material have value and will be redeemed: The things in front of us are sometimes the hardest to see. Schaeffer looks directly at the historic center of the Christian faith – Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension – and sees an affirmation of a principle that is too often overlooked by Christians. He writes: “The resurrection and ascension prove there is no reason to make false dichotomy between the spiritual and the material. That is a totally non-Biblical concept.” In other words, matter matters. Nature matters.

Schaeffer pays attention, too, to the eighth chapter of the book of Romans. “As Christ’s death redeems men, including their bodies, from the consequences of the Fall, so His death will redeem all nature from the Fall’s evil consequences at the time when we are raised from the dead.” In other words, nature is an essential part of the Biblical story of the world from the beginning to the end.

6. Separate from yet united with nature: A core theological concept for Schaeffer is that the God of Christians is unique “in being both infinite and personal.” All of matter is separated from God who is the Creator and who is infinite and who has always been. Yet, God created people in God’s image, which makes them unique. This means that people have a unique relationship with God that the rest of nature does not.

While many Christians stop right there, Schaeffer doesn’t. He asserts that we simultaneously have two different relationships with nature. Yes, we are unique, we are separate, and we do have dominion (the right kind of dominion). But we also have fellowship with everything else in nature. Why? Because we collectively share the same status – we are all creations of God.

“This is the true Christian mentality. It rests upon the reality of creation out of nothing by God. But it also follows that all things are equally created by God. All things were equally created out of nothing. All things, including man, are equal in their origin, as far as creation is concerned.” (Those italics are Schaeffer’s.)

Schaeffer emphasizes this point throughout the book. Here is a startling line in the context of the balance Schaeffer advocates between our right to use nature wisely for our ends and our fellowship with the rest of nature. “Even the moss has a right to live. It is equal with man as a creature of God.”

Humans, especially Christians, however, are quick to assert that we are distinct and separate from the rest of nature. Schaeffer would agree that we are distinct and different and would argue that our ability to have consciousness, choice, and will power are key elements of our uniqueness. This presents a fundamental and spiritual challenge to us. We as humans do have options. We have choices. One of our fundamental choices is whether we do all to nature that we have the capacity to do.

Unthinkingly using all of our unique capacities to manipulate the rest of the created order for our satisfaction and convenience at the cost of nature’s vitality lowers us to the state of the rest of the natural order. Conversely, making the conscious choice to limit ourselves for nature’s prosperity affirms our own humanity.

This is where Schaeffer is making, I believe, a subtle argument that people like Janet Parshall are not picking up. It is easy to conclude that Schaeffer’s title refers only to the idea that pantheism and modern materialism, as reactions to the ongoing destruction of nature, will lead to the death of man. But Schaeffer is also all but saying explicitly that if we do not exercise conscious and moral choices in relation to nature than we are also denying human uniqueness. In fact, if we do that, we are acting with exactly the same values that would flow naturally from an evolutionary, materialist perspective. In other words, not limiting ourselves in how we use our creative powers to extract from nature what we want and not opening ourselves to a psychological relationship with nature leads also to the spiritual death of man even if we have some theologically correct ideas of God.

7. Christians have acted badly: Christianity has, in Schaeffer’s estimation, the answer to the environmental crisis. This is because “It is the Biblical view of nature that gives nature a value in itself…” Nature, in other words, is not just valuable for its practical benefit to us but has its own ethical and spiritual standing. And if we give ourselves to God and allow God to guide our values and actions, then we will treat nature as it should be treated.

But despite having a clear basis for acting rightly toward nature, Christians haven’t. In fact, Schaeffer’s story of the pagan community across from the Christian school captures the sense that Christians have done far worse than many non-Christians in how they treat nature.

“The Christian is called upon to exhibit this dominion, but to exhibit it rightly: treating the thing as having a value in itself, exercising dominion without being destructive. The church should always have taught and done this, but it has generally failed to do so, and we need to confess our failures. Francis Bacon understood this, and so have other Christians at different times; but by and large we must say that for a long, long time Christian teachers, including the best orthodox theologians, has shown a real poverty here.”

And Christians have committed sins of omission throughout history by not defending nature.

“They (hippies) were right in fighting the plastic culture, and the church should have been fighting it, too, a long, long time ago before the counterculture ever came onto the scene.”

Schaeffer even poses this powerful question: “…what would have happened if the church at the time of the Industrial Revolution had spoken out against the economic abuses which arose from it?”

And listen to this critique of Christians and their selective interest in nature that is, 45 years later, as trenchant and stinging as ever.

“Nature has become merely an academic proof of the existence of the Creator, with little value in itself. Christians of this outlook do not show an interest in nature itself. They use it simply as an apologetic weapon, rather than thinking or talking about the real value of nature.”

Amen. AMEN.

Schaeffer takes that line of argument a step further.

“We must confess that we missed our opportunity. We have spoken loudly against materialistic science, but we have done little to show that in practice we ourselves as Christians are not dominated by a technological orientation in regard either to man or nature. We should have been stressing and practicing for a long time that there is a basic reason why we should not do all that with our technology we can do. We have missed the opportunity to help man save his earth. Not only that, but in our generation we are losing an evangelistic opportunity because when modern people have a real sensitivity to nature, many of them turn to the pantheistic mentality. They have seen that most Christians simply do not care about nature as such.”

This is one of the reasons why Schaeffer believes the church has become “irrelevant and helpless in our generation.”

“We are living in and practicing a sub-Christianity.”

In other words, when Christians articulate and live out a faith that is not whole, that does not give proper emphasis to the earth and cosmos, then people are not to be blamed if they find the Christian faith unappealing, inauthentic, and inadequately challenging and so decide not to become disciples of Jesus.

Ultimately, Schaeffer levels a damning suggestion about the impact of a wrong view of nature as well. He suggests, in the form of questions, that our faith in God is not real, that we don’t truly love God (the ultimate Lover), that our faith is not whole and complete and alive in us, if we don’t care for nature.

“If I love the Lover, I love what the Lover has made. Perhaps this is the reason why so many Christians feel an unreality in their Christian lives. If I don’t love what the Lover has made – in the area of man, in the area of nature – and really love it because He made it, do I really love the Lover?”

8. The Church should bring substantial healing to nature: Schaeffer believes that the Fall caused many divisions – man from God, man from himself, man from other people, man from nature, and even nature from nature. These divisions will eventually be completely healed when Christ returns to earth. But we are not simply to wait passively until then. Christians are to believe that with God’s help “substantial healing can be a reality here and now.” “God’s calling to the Christian now, and to the Christian community in the area of nature (just as it is in the area of personal Christian living in true spirituality) is that we should exhibit a substantial healing here and now, between man and nature and nature and itself, as far as Christians can bring it to pass.” In short, the Church and the local church are to do their best within their sphere of influence to live out God’s healing of all relationships as a sign of what God’s kingdom will look like when fully established in all dimensions of life.

What are some characteristics of the substantial healing the Church and the local church should bring?

One is an emphasis on Creation. It is important and not some secondary, optional, tertiary concern.

Another is the right idea of dominion. Dominion is not sovereignty. “It (nature) belongs to God, and we are to exercise our dominion over these things not as though entitled to exploit them, but as things borrowed or held in trust.”

And at the heart of the correct understanding of dominion is the concept of conscious, self-imposed limitations in light of the fact that our dominion is under God’s dominion and that nature is something God values. We will accept limits to our freedom for the sake of what is good and holy. We will not do all that we can do with science and technology. We will be patient.

9. The Christian who gets the relationship with nature right will have a psychological bond with it: Schaeffer is careful not to condone a romanticization of nature but in a nuanced way he repeatedly declares that we can and should have a psychological bond with nature because we know that we are distinct from nature and yet part of it.

“Psychologically, I ought to “feel” a relationship to the tree as my fellow-creature. It is not simply that we ought to feel a relationship intellectually to the tree, and then turn this into just another argument for apologetics, but that we should realize, and train people in our churches to realize, that on the side of creation and on the side of God’s infinity and our finiteness we really are one with the trees!”

Elsewhere Schaeffer writes, “In this sense Saint Francis’s use of the term “brothers to the birds” is not only theologically correct, but a thing to be intellectually thought of and practically practiced. More, it is to be psychologically felt as I face the tree, the bird, the ant.”

He also writes, “Because it is right, on the basis of the whole Christian system – which is strong enough to stand it all because it is true – as I face the buttercup, I say: “Fellow-creature, fellow-creature, I won’t walk on you. We are both creatures together.””

10. Making the choice to accept limits and treat nature rightly brings many benefits: When Christians and the Church act toward nature and relate with nature in the way they should, Schaeffer asserts there will be substantial healing. This healing will be seen in a “new sense of beauty.” “The aesthetic values are not to be despised. God has made man with a sense of beauty that no animal has; no animal has ever produced a work of art. Man as made in the image of God has an aesthetic quality, and as soon as he begins to deal with nature as he should, beauty is preserved in nature.”

And the resulting improvement in the ecological condition of the world will benefit the long-term health of our economy as well as the value of humanity.

We will also experience a renewed sense of wonder. I love this line from Schaeffer in connection with this them: “Life begins to breathe.” And, provocatively, he calls attention to the fact that Charles Darwin shared in his notes that as he got older he lost his joy in the arts and in nature. By contrast, people who believe in God’s creative force behind the world’s creation can and should find that nature inspires joy and wonder.

Finally, choosing to relate to the nature as God intended will endow us with psychological freedom and open up an enhanced relationship with God.

My guess is that you already knew that.

Map of My Kingdom (An Excerpt)

Nathan Aaberg — May 28, 2015 — Leave a comment

Earlier this month, I saw a performance of the one-person play Map of My Kingdom at the meeting of a farmers group in downtown Chicago.The play was commissioned by Practical Farmers of Iowa and written by Iowa’s Poet Laureate, Mary Swander. In the play, the words and remembrances of Angela Martin, a woman who uses her legal and mediating skills to helping farm families transition their farmland from one generation to the next, immerse the viewer in the complexity and emotional intensity of those transitions. There are many references in the play to Shakespeare’s King Lear. In that story, of course, King Lear makes cavalier and egotistical decisions about how he will divide his kingdom among his daughters so he can enjoy a care-free retirement. This goes tragically wrong. Mary Swander’s play reveals to us how human frailties and legal complexities can cause generational transitions to likewise end tragically for farmland-owning families today.

Yet, the play ends on a cautiously positive, understatedly hopeful note. Because that note comes from a story that relates to the themes of this blog so directly, I asked Mary if I could run that final story segment here. She generously agreed.

In the segment you’ll find below, Angela tells the story of how a husband and wife (Marilyn and Gerry) were inspired to do the hard work of carefully transitioning their family’s land to the next generation because they came to realize that being committed stewards of the land was something their Christian faith called them to do.

…….

(ANGELA opens up the LAST BOX.)

But sometimes when it starts to fall apart, a family finds its way. Sometimes I help . . . I am learning to help more and more.

I had known Marilyn and Gerry for a long time. They had a large farm—really thriving. They survived the Farm Crisis, grew responsibly—real respected members of the community. I was surprised when they walked into my office—for a year Gerry worked closely with his lawyer, accountant, and a consultant to make a plan for his land—for after he and Marilyn stopped farming or…well if something happened. Gerry reached this place where he and Marilyn had digested everything that the consultant and lawyer and accountant suggested. Then they set up a meeting with me.

Gerry and Marilyn had everything in order—the books, the abstracts—they had asked tough questions and were working those out together. They worked on a mission statement, a plan for the farm and got their kids and family on board. It had seemed easy.

I didn’t know how hard it had been for them, how hard they had worked to make it seem easy, until Marilyn came into my office a few weeks after Gerry’s passing to put that plan we had made together into motion.

She sat down, exhausted from the funeral and those lonely, weeks after—all that work tying up loose ends, all that work that nobody ever sees, all that work that leaves little time for doing, let alone feeling anything else.

Marilyn came in. I put on the coffee and we just sat. And then she told me a story.

(ANGELA takes on MARILYN, grabbing mug from the box, and sits. She takes a big breath, and exhales quietly. A beat.)

I went to see the pope once.

(A beat.)

Never thought that would be something I’d want to do. Not Catholic, you know. But the Pope was traveling across the states, visiting churches, you know…blessing people…and I got the idea that I was going. This is what I was going to do—see the pope.

Gerry…he was busy, not interested, but said “go on”…you know, knock myself out. With the pope.

That’s funny.

(A beat.)

So I drove into the city—people everywhere—he drove up in that…that Pope-mobile…and you just start waving, you know—can’t help it. He’s there in his little . . .aquarium. . .and you raise your arm up in the air and he’s waving and I felt he was saying “Hi” right to me and I just start hollering, waving, whistling. I mean, I never got to see the Beatles or Elvis, so I guess I got it all out of my system with that pope.

And we settle in to listen to him—sitting on these hard bleachers to…you know…hear the pope.

And Gerry was at home on the farm choring, doing the milking in the barn. I guess he turned on the radio and they were broadcasting the pope…so I was sitting in the bleachers and Gerry was milking, but we are both listening to what this guy had to say. And what is some guy from Rome, you know, with the fancy robe gonna have for us—me on the bleachers, Gerry on the farm? I mean, really?

And the pope started to talk and I was looking around at all these people and Gerry must have been milking, not really listening much and then suddenly we heard the pope talking about the need to be stewards of the land and how we are called to leave the Earth, the soil in better condition than we found it. . . “The land is yours to preserve from generation to generation.”

That hit me. And it hit Gerry.

I started to cry. Right there, the pope talking and tears running down my face.

I got home that night and Gerry was sitting at the table. No, “How was it?” or anything just sitting there—hands folded, thinking.

“Gerry?” I said and he reached over and took my hands…

(MARILYN reaches out, thinking about the moment. A beat.)

Gerry told me he had listened on the radio and almost fell on the barn floor when the pope talked about the land. Gerry started to think about our kids and what we were leaving them. And how we were leaving the farm to them.

And I said, “Me, too.” The pope’s speech did the same thing to me. And we sat there a bit . . .thinking . . .and then we got up, cooked dinner and.. . Well, that was it . . . So we just decided we wanted to figure out what we would do next.

(ANGELA takes off MARILYN, puts mug away, stands.)

And they did.

They found a way to communicate to their kids what they valued and hoped for the land going forward. Everybody signed off on the plan—no surprises. One son was going to stay on, farm the land while renting from his siblings. Gerry had him build another house down the road, far enough away so that he couldn’t see Gerry and Marilyn’s farmstead. Gerry figured that would keep him from trying to meddle in how his son was starting to farm and keep his son from trying to fix what he thought Gerry was doing wrong.

And that wasn’t really the fix you know—it just got the issue out in the open, got them talking about it, Gerry and his son, and they figured it out as they went right up until Gerry passed. It wasn’t easy, but I learned that day how hard they had worked, how much honesty or courage it took to make it look like it was.

…….

I again offer my thanks to Mary Swander (in the photograph above) for allowing the excerpt to be reprinted here. If you know of a group who might find this one-act, one-person play meaningful, please contact her to discuss arrangements. It’s a play worth sharing, especially in rural areas.

Watching the play also reminded me of the power of story and art. It also reminded me that how we treat the land reflects, as do our choices in many other realms of our lives, the real values we live by.

God and the Sewer of the World

Nathan Aaberg — May 21, 2015 — 4 Comments

My wife and I recently attended an eye-opening, two-day workshop for parents of adopted and foster children.

Many of the parents who attended the workshop are struggling as they try to deal with challenging, difficult behaviors from their children whose brains have been wired differently becuase of the trauma they experienced in utero and in the first years of thier lives. Many of the parents have been wounded emotionally. Some have even been physically harmed by their children. At the very same time, they face criticism of their parenting from their own families and from the community around them who simply don’t understand.

With therapeutic parenting, some of these children’s brains can be rewired so they have a chance for a more normal life. Not every child, however, can be healed completely from their trauma no matter what the parents do. Some will always be off kilter in their emotional and cognitive development. The trauma of the broken world persists. And that, in turn, can bring its own trauma to the families who, out of compassion and love, take those children in.

At a breakfast we had with two other couples at the workshop, I asked a question about church, God, and their adoption experiences. The floodgates opened. The other couples poured out their struggles with their faith and with their churches since they had adopted. Neither couple now attends a church. Yet they miss it dearly.

While each couple had particular reasons why they had retreated from their church community, there was one common factor – their adoption journey had led them to have doubts about God.

One of the parents said something to the effect of, “Adoption has dropped me into the sewer of the world. I can’t believe a god in control of the world would allow things to happen that happened to my children.”

By “sewer of the world”, I believe that the parent meant the broken places of the world where there is violence, in utero exposure to drugs and alcohol, sexual abuse, profound neglect, and soul-crushing poverty in one big sordid stew.

Many of us want to avoid even catching a whiff of that stew. Many Christians have an instinctive urge to jump in and rescue God from the somber, raw direction of this conversation.

It’s the same instinct that leads us to say to a friend who is mourning the loss of a loved one, “God took him/her to a better place.” That tone-deaf assertion that God is in control of everything and that all can be seen with rose-colored glasses represents an unwillingness to be vulnerably open to the grief and despair of this world.

If I could have that breakfast conversation over again, I would encourage them to read the whole Bible carefully. In the Bible, you see a more nuanced pattern of God’s sovereignty over the world than is typically assumed. People in the Bible regularly make awful choices. There is no sense that God caused them to do so, and in the Bible we see God angered and frustrated by what they do. In Jesus, we see God profoundly sympathetic to the poor and suffering and sick. There is never any suggestion that God had anything to do with their original condition or willed it to be so.

Nor is there any sustained assertion in the Bible that all suffering leads to good in this world. Sometimes it is just suffering.

In Jesus, we also see God experiencing the sewer of the world. Jesus suffers in almost every conceivable way as he fulfills his mission. If Christians are called to be disciples of Jesus, then part of that discipleship clearly is to work to bring light to where it is most dark. That was the mission of Jesus. And Jesus was no Pollyana. He called things the way they were. There was an edge about him. He frequently expressed anger and sorrow. Jesus wept.

In short, a profound awareness of the brokenness of humanity and the world is completely in tune with the Bible and is as essential a component of a whole faith as is the conviction that God will eventually make all things right.

A recent blog post by Peter Harris, author of Under the Bright Wings and co-founder of the international Christian organization A Rocha, reminds us that the sewer of the world is not limited to human suffering.

In his post, he shares an experience of visiting the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic. He is delighted to see his new grandson there, but he is also painfully aware of the wounded nature of the landscape he sees because he is aware of what the island used to hold.

… St Helena is a sobering place to ecological eyes, because it serves as a metaphor for much that is now happening so fast to habitats and species around the world. In the early 17th century the Portuguese landed goats and in just a hundred years they had reduced huge areas of its lush landscape to bare rock. For millennia St Helena had been home to hundreds of unique species, but most are now gone.

There are a million St. Helenas around the world. They are tangible evidence of what has been lost, of the profound misuse of the gift of freedom given to humanity.

People who care about God’s earth, whether they be believers or not, lament what has been lost and work to defend what is left. But our culture has often recoiled from them. This is in part because we are too often unwilling to be present and open to the impact of our brokenness. It’s too painful.

Aldo Leopold captured this when he wrote: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds”

I believe a whole Christian faith must include sensitivity to all the forms of brokenness in the world.

That sensitivity to brokenness needs to be part of our consciousness, part of how we communicate the faith, part of where we are willing to go emotionally even as we have hope for what will come. This is because we know how much goodness was put into the world, how good things could and should be.

That sensitivity is not about being passively morose.

Instead, that vulnerability should arouse in us an implacable will to heal hurts, restore what can be restored of the abundant good God originally endowed people and creation with, and do all we can to prevent further pain and suffering.

That’s why quickly passing over the sewer of the world on the bridge of assertions that God is in control is such a problem. That simplistic, one-note approach to the Christian faith allows us to rationalize our retreat back to the comfortable Shire of our lives.

Our faith in life beyond death and our hope that all things work together for good for those who love God is actually, I believe, the rope we are equipped with to descend into the sewer with light. No one should be alone in a world of wounds. Christians should be there with them.

Above all, I believe that God ultimately desires us not to wait for all things to be put right but to be God’s hands and feet in doing our best to put them right now. No matter what the odds.

The two couples we spoke with are doing exactly that. They are doing their very best to restore a broken world in a way that will always test them and that will likely always mean a less than ideal world for them. It is profoundly sad that they feel abandoned by their faith communities and unsure of what to make of God even as they act the way Christians should.

And we could all learn something from them about what can happen when we do what we can to heal the wounds of the world.

Later in the workshop one of the fathers from that breakfast said something surprising and profound about his family’s adoption experience. He said, and I paraphrase, “Looking back, I wouldn’t do anything different even if I had the chance. I see the world differently. My wife and I have been changed in ways that couldn’t have happened any other way.”

Cover Crops & God’s Renewal: An Interview with Dave Robison

Nathan Aaberg — April 23, 2015 — Leave a comment

I met Dave Robison at a talk he gave about cover crops to a farmers group in downtown Chicago. I was struck by his passion for his topic, his gracious way of interacting with the audience, and his gift for communicating complex information clearly and with humility. Many people came up to him afterwards with many questions, which he patiently answered for more than a half hour. This commitment is not new. For many years now, he has poured tremendous energy into sharing insights into this way of being a good steward of farmland. At one point, for instance, he made 51 presentations on cover crops in 50 days. And as you’ll see in this interview, he is a Christian who does what he does out of his faith. As way of background, Dave and his wife Sally have seven children and live in northeastern Indiana. Dave manages the alfalfa division of Legacy Seeds. The love, energy, and mission that come from his faith are palpable in his words. (To learn more about Dave and cover crops, visit his blog at www.plantcovercrops.com. Cover crops, by the way, are crops that farmers plant for land stewardship purposes – like preventing soil erosion, managing water, building soil fertility, creating better soil structure, and suppressing weeds. Uncovered soil is vulnerable to erosion, weeds, and a decline in soil vitality.)

From your blog, I learned that you received a degree in agronomy from Purdue and that you were also the pastor of a country church for three years. That’s an interesting combination. Can you tell me a little about your life and your faith history?

DR: I graduated from Purdue in 1980. I got married right after college, and few months later, my wife got saved. In the church I was in, it was all about works and working my way to a relationship with God. My wife started spending a lot of time reading the Scriptures, obeying God’s Word, and I was seeing a real contrast between what I had grown up with and her life. Of course, I always thought she was wrong. (laughter) Then I began listening to Bible ministries of J. Vernon McGee and Chuck Swindoll and John McArthur and started having a better grasp of the Scriptures. I had taught Sunday school for years. I became chairman of the deacons, and there were 60 deacons in the church. I was chairman of committee on committees. So I was working hard to prove to myself, to my wife, to everybody that I was a Christian even though I had no relationship with Jesus. In 1989, nine years after my wife had been saved, I was listening to a sermon by Charles Stanley and it was just like, “I give up.” Salvation by grace through faith is the only way. So that day, as I was driving around Indianapolis on Highway 465, I gave my life to Christ and started crying. It was one of those Apostle Paul scales-falling-off-your-eyes kind of experiences. I had taught Sunday school for years, youth group for years. I was in some fairly high positions at the church, and then I got saved. A few months later I got baptized, which really sent reverberations around the church. What’s the chairman of the deacons doing getting baptized?

A couple years later, we felt called to the mission field, and both my wife and I went to Grace Theological Seminary. We got our masters of divinity at Grace, but during seminary we also had two more children so that now gave us four. We had school debt and farm debt and still owned a farm. So foreign missions was not going to work. But God brought the mission field to us in the fact that in the area where we live we have somewhere close to 10,000 Hispanic families. So about 12 years ago we started working with Hispanic families and sharing the Gospel. Most of that is with children and teenagers. There have been a number of families that have been saved and some teenagers that have been saved.

There’s been a remarkable difference in my life once Christ was truly Savior of my life, and I didn’t have to work to be saved.

So how does this tie in with your farming past and your cover crop work?

DR: We farmed for 11 years after we graduated from Purdue in 1980. In our first four years of farming (’80, ’81, ’82, ’83) we had two major weather events, and we had a mismanagement event. So all of sudden in those four years we had lost close to $90,000. We went from “This might work” to “This is really going to be hard.” So then I started working off the farm for a dairy farmer running a feed mill for him and that’s when I started learning about improved forages, especially improved alfalfa.

From a cover crop perspective, our family started no-till farming back in 1968. My father was very much one who wanted to take care of the soil but part of that was also out of convenience. We were growing rapidly, and we did not have massive equipment and did not have massive amounts of labor. It was my mom and dad and myself and my wife, and once the babies started coming, my wife was very helpful but she was a stay-at-home mom and taking care of babies. My mother had a bad back, and my dad worked full time at Eli Lily as a research scientist. So we, pretty much out of necessity continued to do a lot of no-till. Like a lot of pioneers in industries, we tried things that just flat out did not work.

But one year in the early 80’s we had a tremendous crop of sweet clover that came up volunteer (in the farming and land management world, “volunteer”refers to plants that appear without having been planted) on one of our farms. I guess the weather conditions had been just perfect over the winter. We ended up having corn that year that yielded almost 200 bushel an acre. That was way before other folks were getting 200-bushel-an-acre corn. The fellow that sprayed for us had a sprayer in the back of a pickup, and the sweet clover was taller than his boom. He ended up getting some mediocre kill. We ended up having to come back in and do some rescue spraying and so forth and he told us, “If you ever do that again I’ll never spray for you.” So we heard that message loud and clear. We also saw that we got 200 bushels per acre, but we didn’t put together that it was the sweet clover that gave us the improved yield so we never allowed for much growth in anything to be there in the spring again.

About seven or eight years ago as my father and I were talking about cover crops, I said, “Dad, do you remember the year at the one farm where we had sweet clover?” And he said, “That was the best corn we ever had.” And I said, “That’s because we followed a cover crop.”

To go back to the faith question and cover crops, I guess the biggest issue for us was no-tilling was convenient. But, for me, after I was saved, it became “You know what, this isn’t just convenience, this isn’t just farming. This is we have to be good stewards of what God has given us.” We would verbally say that but then it became something that was real when we started seeing the results of the experiments we were doing. We started experimenting on our home farm south of Indianapolis, and that’s when we started seeing quite a bit of difference in soil. Some of these soils have been no-till for 25 to 30 consecutive years, and we were seeing massive differences in our soil even after having cover crops for only one year.

Not that we worshipped the earth. We worship Christ. But we also realized then that we had a responsibility. It became a real issue for us when we found that we had compaction at about three inches deep on our farm, even though we had been no-tilling for so long. It was like, “Wow. We’re only farming an extremely shallow amount of soil here.” When we started using cover crops we started noticing that we were farming much deeper in the soil profile. I was on a farm then where we were having corn roots 70” deep. That’s really good for drought tolerance.

Back in 1979 I was in Fort Collins, Colorado, at a national public speaking contest for the American Society of Agronomy. The morning of the contest we were given a topic that we were to speak on, and my topic was on soil health, and I actually ended up winning the student sub-division of this national contest. I used an orange to compare the fact that we’re just farming the peel and even though the peel is the most nutritious part of the orange we typically don’t real good care of it. Therefore we need to do a better job of taking care of our layer of soil that God’s given us and that has the most nutrition.

I’ve thought many, many times over the years about the truth that God has given us the best part, but we have to take care of it and oftentimes we throw it away. We need to recognize that we have a responsibility not only to ourselves but also to future generations, a responsibility to take care of what God has given us. God’s called us to be responsible and good stewards, and we as farmers and as people involved in agriculture have some of the greatest responsibility.

How did you go from that insight to becoming a cover crop blogger and, to use the term loosely, evangelist?

DR: Back about six years ago I was working for a really awesome company out of Indiana as their forage manager and agronomist. I was in charge of alfalfa and forage sales and went all over the five-state region, especially Michigan and Indiana and Ohio, sharing about the value of improved forages and proper grazing techniques and how farmers could be much more profitable in their operations if they were managing well. I was invited to a field day at Purdue University’s southeast farm, and I was looking at the top growth of the winter rye and of the annual rye grass and the different wheat. They had dug soil pits, and I’m looking at all of this awesome feed that’s on top of the surface of the soil. It’s anywhere from knee high to waist high, and I’m thinking this will be fantastic for a dairy or a beef operation. Then we got into the root pit, and we were finding roots 35” deep on annual rye grass and the rye and the wheat about 20” deep.

Dave in a root pit showing soil health impact of turnips used as cover crops.

Now I had already been doing some things about cover crops at that time, but I wasn’t thinking anything more than erosion control. Even with the experience with the sweet clover, I still wasn’t connecting everything yet. So I made a statement to Dr. Eileen Kladivko from Purdue who was running the field day. I said, “I really don’t care about what’s happening beneath the surface of the soil. All I care is about is what can be harvested on top. “ And as soon as I said that I realized that was contradictory to how I had farmed and also contradictory to what I had just seen. And everybody was like, “Whoa, I can’t believe you just said that!” I realized that my size-11 shoe was sideways in my mouth.

Two days later Eileen calls me and asks, “Would you be interested in being on the Midwest Cover Crop Council?” I agreed, went to a couple of meetings, and realized that this cover crop thing is vital to agriculture.

So then the company I worked for back in 2008 and 2009 was hit hard when the housing crisis hit. We took some pay cuts. I had already got pretty involved on the cover crop side and was already starting to promote our cover crops. I saw a huge need for our company to find another income source, but I also found that I was getting five to 10 phone calls per day from farmers saying, “Hey, I’m interested in these cover crops. Can you give me an hour?” That’s 10 hours in a day. So one of my best friends who worked at the same company said, “You know what? I’ve been looking into this stuff called blogging (of course, I had no idea what that was.). You write it. I’ll do some editing. And we’ll get it online, and maybe we can send people to the blog so you don’t have to spend so much time on the phone.”

So we did that and now we have about 80,000 people a year reading the blog, and somewhere around 3,000 people on the email list. And I probably get 20 emails a week from the blog that I try my best to answer. I speak all over North America on cover crops, especially the eastern half of the U.S. (Nebraska eastward) and in Ontario and Quebec. I don’t make money on that. It’s all volunteer.

The beautiful thing to me is that the company I got started with is now moving over 20 million pounds of cover crop seed per year. The company that is a kind of a sister company to them is moving somewhere around 10-15 million, and our company is moving 2-3 million. More and more farmers are recognizing the value of utilizing cover crops. From my perspective, if we can help farmers to be more profitable and do it in a very responsible way at the same time, then we’ve accomplished something outstanding for that family farm but also at the same time been good stewards of what God’s given us.

And I believe if it’s not going to be profitable for the farmer then the farmer’s going to be put into a situation where he’s going to have to say, “Well, I want to be a good steward, but…” And frankly I get a lot of those comments. There are a lot of times we do things that don’t pay, but this is one that I see a lot of people saying, “Well, if I’m not going to get my money back I’m not going to do it.” Which tells me that there are still a lot of farmers that aren’t understanding the stewardship issue yet.

What have you learned about God, people, and God’s earth from promoting cover crops and testing them?

DR: We have corn plants and soybean plants that when they hit a zone of compaction will take their roots horizontally. We have a little radish plant that might be the size of a pencil lead or an annual rye grass plant that is two inches tall or crimson clover that’s three inches tall that will get through that compaction zone. So in God’s Creation He has created different species of plants that have different characteristics that we can utilize that will help us to be able to best utilize our cash crops. God is not a God who deteriorates but is a God who renews. He has given us opportunities through his Son Christ to have a relationship with Him and a renewed spirit, a new life, and renewed hope. He has also given us, on the agricultural side, different species of different plants that help to better renew our soils and to better replenish our soils.

God, at least the God I see through Scripture, is one who always provides new hope, new life, new renewal, and man, because of sin, is one who deteriorates. That to me is a major theological foundation for us to understand that as we are stewards of what God has given us. He has given us the opportunity to renew some things that we have deteriorated, and some of those species of cover crops allow us to do that.

It’s interesting that Christians like Joel Salatin, Gabe Brown, and yourself are having a positive impact promoting sustainable farming practices.

DR: I think there are more. I know some other folks that are strong believers that are doing things on a local basis. Some of us are called to be, and I don’t know if I want to use this phrase, the Billy Grahams of the cover crop world. There’s no question that God has blessed Gabe and myself and Joel and a variety of other folks who are believers to be able to verbalize and communicate well and communicate with integrity. But there are a lot of Christians who do things on their local and regional basis.

I want to make sure I tell you about Zambia. A real good friend of mine that I worked with a lot took his family to Zambia. He is now an agricultural missionary. They are running a farm to feed the community, and they sell produce off of this farm and make money for the community. It’s been a fabulous ministry not only from an agricultural perspective but also for sharing Christ with this community. I got an email from him a couple of days ago, and he was thanking me for teaching him as much as I did about cover crops and for my blog and for my YouTube videos.

They are using cover crops in Zambia to be able to build their soil health. He said their farming yields and soil have improved tremendously since they started using cover crops. That made me say, “OK, God, this has been worth it over these 10 years now.” It was really interesting to me to hear a brother in Christ halfway around the world who is using training he got when he was in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to now be able to use those practices to help witness for Christ about not only soil health but spiritual health. What a blessing. When I got that email from him I got goose bumps.

What you do for a living, what I do for a living, for me it’s Colossians 3:17. “And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” Everything we do is for Christ.

Do your wife and your children get as excited about cover crops as you do?

DR: My wife does. In fact, I’ve called her the cover crop queen on my blog, because we have some relatively sandy and relatively poor soil on our property and she is always urging me to do something different. In fact, late last fall when I thought it was way, way too late to plant cover crops, she said, “Do you have any samples of seed?” And I said, “Well, yeah.” And she goes, “Well, I’m going to go out and plant cover crops.” The ground was nearly frozen. I’m like, “Honey, this just isn’t going to work.” She’s like, ”Well, remember when we planted radishes a few years ago when it was too late, and we ended up with a real nice radish crop in the spring? And how many earthworms were in my flowerbed?” “Yes,” I said. “Well,” she said, “we’re going to do that again.” So she planted cover crops really late, and now we have a really beautiful crop of hairy vetch that’s survived the winter and is looking beautiful in our flowerbeds, and it is producing nitrogen.

All of my children recognize the value of stewardship, whether that be stewardship of our soil or taking care of our brothers and sisters or of taking care of the needy. We want to make sure our children see that giving is better than receiving. Again, it’s all about Colossians 3:17.

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Bold Insights from a Different Francis

Map of My Kingdom (An Excerpt)

God and the Sewer of the World

Cover Crops & God’s Renewal: An Interview with Dave Robison

Meet Nathan Aaberg

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